Professor set to ‘control’ wife by
cyborg implant. “Surgeons are preparing to create the first husband and wife
cyborgs: they intend to implant computer chips in a British
professor and his wife to see if they can communicate
sensation and movement by thought alone.” I don’t know if it’s just the way The Times covered it, but the wife’s comments on being part of such a momentous event seem pretty prosaic. She is worried about going under anaesthesia for the implant procedure, and she says she agreed to do it because she didn’t want her husband linked up to another woman. Perhaps the ‘control’ issue in that marriage is settled even without a chip implant? The Sunday Times

This Juice Gets Joints Jumping. U.S. ski team surgeon and orthopedist develops Joint Juice, a “new edgy drink” [I hope this is ‘edgy’ as in ‘on the edge’ rather than ‘on edge’…] containing glucosamine, which preliminary evidence suggests can facilitate the maintenance and proliferation of cartilage. The drink is being marketed to arthritis sufferers and athletes concerned with preventing joint breakdown. I’m not sure the developer’s boast that “it took three years to develop because (glucosamine) tastes so bad” is actually a selling point. Wired

“…and if you think Peace is a common goal, well that goes to show just how little you know!” BushWacker is “a weblog on Bush and serious politics” by an FmH reader. Best wishes, Fred!

The FTC Pushes Music Censorship As Consumer Protection: ‘First there was the September
Federal Trade Commission report entitled “Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children.” Then there
was a wild hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, in which Lynne Cheney submitted her
review of Eminem’s new album: “It is despicable. It is horrible. This is dreadful. This is shameful. This
is awful.” Then last Tuesday the FTC released a follow-up report, singling out the record industry for
pernicious marketing practices. Thursday, Joe Lieberman, along with senators Herb Kohl
(D-Wisconsin) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York), introduced the Media Marketing
Accountability Act of 2001. The bill would “treat the marketing of adult-rated movies, music, and
video games to children like any other deceptive act that harms consumers . . . [I]t would give the
FTC the authority . . . to penalize companies that violate this provision with civil fines up to $11,000
per offense.” ‘

And “saving kids from offensive lyrics is nothing new, as this time line demonstrates.” Village Voice

The FTC Pushes Music Censorship As Consumer Protection: ‘First there was the September
Federal Trade Commission report entitled “Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children.” Then there
was a wild hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, in which Lynne Cheney submitted her
review of Eminem’s new album: “It is despicable. It is horrible. This is dreadful. This is shameful. This
is awful.” Then last Tuesday the FTC released a follow-up report, singling out the record industry for
pernicious marketing practices. Thursday, Joe Lieberman, along with senators Herb Kohl
(D-Wisconsin) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York), introduced the Media Marketing
Accountability Act of 2001. The bill would “treat the marketing of adult-rated movies, music, and
video games to children like any other deceptive act that harms consumers . . . [I]t would give the
FTC the authority . . . to penalize companies that violate this provision with civil fines up to $11,000
per offense.” ‘

And “saving kids from offensive lyrics is nothing new, as this time line demonstrates.” Village Voice

The FTC Pushes Music Censorship As Consumer Protection: ‘First there was the September
Federal Trade Commission report entitled “Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children.” Then there
was a wild hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, in which Lynne Cheney submitted her
review of Eminem’s new album: “It is despicable. It is horrible. This is dreadful. This is shameful. This
is awful.” Then last Tuesday the FTC released a follow-up report, singling out the record industry for
pernicious marketing practices. Thursday, Joe Lieberman, along with senators Herb Kohl
(D-Wisconsin) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York), introduced the Media Marketing
Accountability Act of 2001. The bill would “treat the marketing of adult-rated movies, music, and
video games to children like any other deceptive act that harms consumers . . . [I]t would give the
FTC the authority . . . to penalize companies that violate this provision with civil fines up to $11,000
per offense.” ‘

And “saving kids from offensive lyrics is nothing new, as this time line demonstrates.” Village Voice

The chamber revolution: “It’s never been harder for string quartets to make a living.” Telegraph UK And: What’s New in Classical Music? Not Much. “We’re still too close to the 20th century to say for sure, but most people would
probably pick film as the international art form of the era, with pop music a close
second. In comparison, classical music was hardly a contender: quite a slip from
the highs of the 19th century. Classical music is in trouble, and unless some basic
things change, the troubles will continue in the 21st century.” Except for special events for informed audiences in international cultural capitals, classical music is culturally marginal. New York Times

The FTC Pushes Music Censorship As Consumer Protection: ‘First there was the September
Federal Trade Commission report entitled “Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children.” Then there
was a wild hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, in which Lynne Cheney submitted her
review of Eminem’s new album: “It is despicable. It is horrible. This is dreadful. This is shameful. This
is awful.” Then last Tuesday the FTC released a follow-up report, singling out the record industry for
pernicious marketing practices. Thursday, Joe Lieberman, along with senators Herb Kohl
(D-Wisconsin) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York), introduced the Media Marketing
Accountability Act of 2001. The bill would “treat the marketing of adult-rated movies, music, and
video games to children like any other deceptive act that harms consumers . . . [I]t would give the
FTC the authority . . . to penalize companies that violate this provision with civil fines up to $11,000
per offense.” ‘

And “saving kids from offensive lyrics is nothing new, as this time line demonstrates.” Village Voice

Making the Cut. The forthcoming enormous Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism establishes critical theory as a basic component of the college-level study of literature and sets the canon, even after the publisher had the editors cut a number of figures from the book, complaining that its size would make it too expensive and unwieldy to market widely. But it is much more theory than literary criticism, the editors having concluded that it would be difficult to include examples of ‘close reading’ of texts with which a less-broadly-read audience might not be sufficiently familiar. One critic opines:

“Criticism
implies some engagement with writing, but there’s almost none of
that here. Norton anthologies have always been about
literature. This reflects a really unfortunate trend toward the
study of ideas about ideas about literature. It’s metacriticism,
really.” Chronicle of Higher Education [via Robot Wisdom]

“Scientists have confirmed that the first
genetically altered humans have been born and
are healthy.

Up to 30 such children have been born, 15 of
them as a result of one experimental
programme at a US laboratory.

But the technique has
been criticised as
unethical by some
scientists and would be
illegal in many
countries, including the
United Kingdom.” BBC The New York Times spin on the story is different, choosing to highlight the fact that these babies have genetic material from three different people.

Jay Belsky doesn’t play well with others: “Colleagues of the controversial child-care expert (featured prominently in coverage of last week’s study showing a link between increased aggression in children and time spent in day care) say he
hogs the limelight, has an agenda and makes alarmist claims
that the evidence doesn’t support.” Salon

China’s Execution, Inc.: “The People’s Republic Has Long Been Suspected of Selling
Organs From Prisoners. Now One New York Doctor Knows the
Rumors Are True.

In China, human rights groups say, citizens have been executed for nonviolent offenses like taking
bribes, credit card theft, small-scale tax evasion, and stealing truckloads of vegetables. Political
dissidents have also been sentenced to death. Chinese embassy officials did not respond to requests
for comment, but in the past the government has denied promoting the for-profit organ trade…

Executions in China have surged to 400 in April alone as the
Communist government conducts another of its periodic “strike hard” crackdowns on crime. During
the most recent campaign, in 1996, more than 4000 prisoners were killed…

Even in a normal year China executes more inmates than in all other nations combined, reports
Amnesty International. In 1999, the confirmed toll reached 1263, according to the organization,
which gathers its statistics from tallies published, for propaganda purposes, in government-run
newspapers.” Village Voice

A Guide to the Hall of Fame of Cartoonist Cranks. “Cranks are people who
get stuck on an issue and can’t shut up
about it. It always pops up, and always in
the wrong place. You could be discussing
the funny thing you just heard on the train
and within seconds you’re back to getting
that damned marriage penalty tax cut —
NOW. Cranks, they just can’t let it go. The
world irritates them so, what with its
dimwitted Presidents, half-baked legal
system, and all those noisy kids riding their
damn bikes on your lawn.” Suck

Review of the Field Guide to the Difficult Patient Interview by Platt and Gordon. JAMA

Lethality Without Guilt? ‘The U.S. military is trying to
go green, and not just with berets or fatigues.

In a multimillion dollar project, the Army has
come up with a new bullet said to be just as
deadly as the old lead-based one but cleaner for the Earth.

“We want to be good stewards of the environment,” said Army spokeswoman
Karen Baker.’ Fox News

‘Stem cells” can be harvested from postmortem brains and surgical specimens, up to twenty hours postmortem. Ethical conflicts about the use of fetal stem cells could be avoided if this proved a viable source of tissue to treat neurodegenerative diseases, for example. Nature

Chevron redubs ship named for Bush aide. “Leaving a wave of controversy in its wake, one of
the most visible reminders of the Bush
administration’s ties to big oil – the 129,000-ton
Chevron tanker Condoleezza Rice – has quietly
been renamed, Chevron officials acknowledged
yesterday.

… The giant vessel was part of the international fleet
of the San Francisco- based multinational oil firm,
christened several years ago in honor of Rice, a
longtime Chevron board member. Rice, a former
Stanford University provost, served on Chevron’s
board from 1991 until Jan. 15, when she
resigned after Bush named her his top national
security aide. ” SF Chronicle

The Execution Tapes: Radio Documentary by Sound Portraits. Controversial show aired on WNYC in New York, including recordings made in Georgia’s death house during state electrocutions; the first time the public gets to hear what happens during a state-sponsored killing. Read the transcripts or listen in Real Audio.

“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” says Grover Norquist: ‘Field Marshal’ of the Bush Plan .

‘Stocky, bearded and owlish, Norquist, 45, is a thumb-in-the-eye radical rightist whose tactical sophistication and singularity of purpose has led observers
to compare him, with some drollery, to Lenin. A Harvard-educated intellectual and self-conscious student of the left, over the past decade Norquist has
eclipsed such older stalwarts as Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation, David Keene of the American Conservative Union and Paul Weyrich of the Free
Congress Foundation to emerge as the managing director of the hard-core right in Washington. But while firmly planted on the extreme end of the
political spectrum, Norquist has also built a solid working alliance with the Fortune 500 corporate elite and its K Street lobbyists. “What he’s managed to
do is to chain the ideological conservatives together with the business guys, who have money, and to put that money to work in the service of the
conservative movement,” says Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America’s Future, who’s repeatedly clashed with Norquist. “And he picks big issues.”
Besides taxes, Norquist is also the go-to guy on virtually all of the right’s favorite agenda items, from privatization of Social Security and Medicare to
school vouchers and deregulation.’ The Nation

Flown Soyuz Descent Capsule to be Auctioned:” A flown Russian descent capsule from Soyuz
TM-26 will be only the second flown manned capsule to be publicly
auctioned, and is the only joint U.S./MIR spacecraft ever to be
offered for sale. This is a historic piece of equipment, which comes ‘fully loaded’ and
includes an invitation for two to attend a Russian space launch, a
guided VIP tour of Star City and a tour of RSC Energia. Perhaps
even more important, all shipping, packing and customs detail will
be handled free of charge to the winning bidder.” Somewhat scorched from reentry, naturally.

Large Art Creates a New Breed of Movers and Shakers: “Art has always moved the masses, but it
takes a cadre of specialists to move massive
art. … With all the variables, it is not
surprising that museums rely on experts,
usually outside contractors, to do the work.” New York Times

Seven Days of Spam: a writer responds to all 107 spam e-mails he receives in a typical week, and what has he got in the end for his efforts? LA Times

Where are the media as Bush redefines himself, and us? “After three months, what do
we know about the Bush administration? Less
than we should. A review of the press coverage
of President Bush reveals some unexpected and
troubling features of contemporary political
journalism.

What is most striking is that the image emerging
of Bush as president is so indistinct. Even the
most serious newspapers in the country have
pulled back dramatically on covering the
presidency.” Sacramento Bee

Excerpts from Slanting the Story: the forces that shape the news by Trudy Lieberman:

Part 1, Black Holes of Power: how, with the help of the
mainstream media, right-wing think tanks have moved their ideas
to the front of the national agenda and engineered big changes in
public policy.

Part 2, Ralph Nader and the Right: how the right wing has
co-opted the media strategies pioneered by consumer activist
Ralph Nader.

Part 3, Courting the Press: how the Manhattan Institute put tort
reform on the national agenda.

Part 4, Clubbing the Press: how conservatives, by criticizing the
“liberal” press, have moved the media further to the right.

Part 5, Advancing the Cause: how the Heritage
Foundation has framed the debate on Medicare reform.

TomPaine.com

Gore in 2004? That’s a toughie for Democrats. “(H)is popular-vote victory and near-tie in Florida have, at least with
some, left Gore with a plausible rationale for a comeback campaign in
2004.

That’s a prospect the Democrats need to mull long and hard.

For whether he campaigns as moderate New Democrat or a
tub-thumping neopopulist, if the party’s 2004 nominee concludes his
convention speech by turning to plant a lingering liplock on Tipper, the
Democrats may well have missed one of the most basic lessons from
Campaign 2000.” Boston Globe

Found on memepool: “Curiosity is building around Jeanine Salla‘s connections with the film A.I.
… and with the mysterious death of Evan Chan. Some amateur
investigators are trying to unravel the mystery.”

British woman killed by own bomb “… in Athens yesterday when a bomb she was
carrying in her car exploded.

Police investigators think that her rottweiller
probably set off the remote control detonator.” Telegraph UK

Outrage at Indonesia Court’s Timor Murder Sentences: “Indonesia jailed six
men for up to 20 months on Friday over
the brutal slaying of three U.N. aid
workers in West Timor, and immediately
earned international outrage for being
too lenient.” Reuters

Rational rant about Bob Kerrey’s confession of war atrocities from Jorn’s friend Jeff Dorchen (This Is Hell):

“I really want all you listeners to look at what stories get told about the Vietnam war. Because they really concern us. If we allow the
Vietnam war to become story about a series of tragic accidents, I think we’ll really lose something. We’ll lose the vivid image of a war that
really was one of the purest of all wars. It’s an example not of war’s insanity, but of its rationality. Of the calculatedly vicious, violent,
unconscionable decisions of those who were the managers of the war. There was no separation from the dark and the light. There was no
heart of darkness here in the heart of the jungle, with civilization so many miles away from the madness of primal evil. Evil civilization was
supervising the madness, moving the pieces on the map below into each other for the purpose of creating hell.

If we don’t remember this key aspect of the war against Indochina we run the risk of slipping into the complacent stance that ‘all people
really just want to do what’s right– like in the Vietnam War, our good intentions just got totally out of hand, and it just kept snowballing into
this monster no one could stop.’ No, there are people who have no such desire to do what’s right, they’re perfectly happy to do what they
know to be so horrible that they’d rather kill innocent people than let it be discovered.”

Jorn Barger, in Robot Wisdom, pointed today to “Cat Yronwode’s Internet romance”. I don’t know why; perhaps she’s a friend; I surfed out of curiosity. Among other things I found, these are some links to the writings of the man she just married, who refers to himself in various ways including “nagasiva yronwode: tyaginator, nigris (333), nocTifer, lorax666, boboroshi”. Not for the faint of heart; not quite sure why I’m linking to them…

Monk Mind and Eternity: “Entertainment is a form of enlightenment which takes
place in eternity. Eternity is so far away, so unreal, and so
subtle that few of us can reach it. We find it so appealing
to spend our time in eternity. We find eternity so appealing
that we go to lengths to engage it. We engage eternity by
focussing on our navel or watching our breath or counting socks.
Some lazes and Buddha-heds have named this delightful activity
‘monk mind’, because the mind, in its efforts to engage eternity,
sits quietly and obediently as a monk in a zendo. Probably a
healthier way to engage it, if you must engage eternity, is by
jumping about wildly like a monkey in a cage, dancing, walking,
etc. But advice from Far Western sages would tell us that
doing whatever we want to do is the healthiest way to handle
entertainment or encounter ‘eternity’.”

Hermetic Self-Destruction Ritual: “Beyond the possible necessities of having contacted and communed
with the Holy Guardian Angel, developing one’s Body of Light to
absolute perfection, and resolving all material world affairs,
the following items will be necessary:

Poison (suffient to effect a slow but sure death)

Bottle of ticks (ravenous and lively)

Scalpel (seriously sharp)

Ice Pick (rusty)

Bolt Cutters (light but effective)

Acid (pref. Aqua Regia or some more potent concoction)

Chain Saw (the lighter the better)

(optional) Firecrackers (illegal in some states)”

Encouraging Suicide — Frequently Asked Questions:
“Attempts at suicide, and suicidal thoughts or feelings are usually
a symptom indicating that a person is ready and needful of a change,
often as a result of some event or series of events that one
personally finds overwhelmingly traumatic or distressing… Since this decision can be extremely difficult to make, this
article is an attempt to provide encouragement for suicide, so
that we may be prepared to recognize and help ourselves to end
the pain and the parasitic drain on ecological and social resources.”

The Satanism of JDeboo:
“Having received volume #5 of Jeffrey Deboo’s (hereafter
‘JDeboo’) Satanist essays in 1998, I’d like to to provide a
review of his expressions on the subject of Satanism as I feel
his text is the most eloquent and convincing of Satanists that
I have seen besides that which flows from my own cursor.”

[Poor Cat??!]

“In a move that reflected a growing frustration with America’s attitude toward international organizations and treaties, the United States was voted off the United Nations Human Rights Commission today for the first time since the panel’s founding under American leadership in 1947. The ouster of the United States from the commission while nations like Sudan and Pakistan were chosen for membership was certain to generate further hostility to the United Nations among conservatives in Washington. The unexpected move, which came in a secret vote, was apparently supported even by some friends of the United States. The vote also served notice that a bloc of developing nations opposed to American policies is becoming much stronger and more effective, and that Washington can no longer expect to be elected automatically to important panels.” New York Times Best seen as the world community’s verdict on America-under-the-Clown-Prince, it seems. Reuters

Murder Victims’ Families Try to Spare McVeigh: “Right up until convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh takes his last breath on May 16, Bud Welch says he will fight to stop the execution of the man who
took his only daughter in the Oklahoma City blast.

Death penalty opponent Welch lost his daughter Julie Marie in the Alfred P. Murrah federal
building bombing on April 19, 1995, and says that killing McVeigh will only
deepen his pain.”

Lionel Tiger: ‘Brain-and-Mouth Disease’: Nonsense About Low-Fat Diets New York Press

The Quest For A Superkid: “Geniuses are made, not born — or so parents are told. But can we
really train baby brains, and should we try?” Time

Strange articles are popping up in the British Medical Journal, observes the acerbic Feedback column in The New Scientist.

Brain, genetic studies shed light on stuttering

‘… “For a long time, stuttering
was thought to be psychogenic, rooted purely in psychology,” says
Allen Braun of the National Institute on Deafness and Other
Communication Disorders. “That’s clearly not the case now.”

Genetic quirk? Now the focus is on genes and the inner workings of
the brain. Investigators announced last November at the American
Speech-Language-Hearing Association meeting that they had found the
first tangible evidence of a genetic aberration underlying at least some
cases of stuttering. What’s more, new PET imaging studies have
revealed striking differences in the brain physiology of stutterers and
nonstutterers. Stutterers, it turns out, may be using the wrong side of
their brains when they speak. “The right hemisphere seems to be
interrupting or interfering with the left hemisphere,” says Peter Fox,
neurologist and director of research imaging at the University of Texas
Health Science Center.

The new findings don’t mean that the crushing anxiety many stutterers
feel has nothing to do with their affliction. But researchers now suspect
that psychological factors, such as nervousness and stress, are not the
starting point; instead they “aggravate, exacerbate, and perpetuate,”
says Edward Conture, professor of hearing and speech sciences at
Vanderbilt University. A neurological mishap may cause a person to
stutter on a word for the first time; later the stutterer might remember the
embarrassing experience, making him more likely to stumble over the
word again.’

And writer Edward Hoagland’s memoir of his lofelong struggle with stuttering:

Stuttering is like trying to run with loops of rope around your feet. And
yet you feel that you do want to run because you may get more words
out that way before you trip: an impulse you resist so other people won’t
tell you to “calm down” and “relax.” Because they themselves may
stammer a little bit when jittery or embarrassed, it’s hard for a real
stutterer like me to convince a new acquaintance that we aren’t
perpetually in such a nervous state and that it’s quite normal for us to be
at the mercy of strangers. Strangers are usually civilized, once the
rough and sometimes inadvertently hurtful process of recognizing what
is wrong with us is over (that we’re not laughing, hiccuping, coughing, or
whatever) and in a way we plumb them for traces of schadenfreude. A
stutterer knows who the good guys are in any crowded room, as well as
the location of each mocking gleam, and even the St. Francis type, who
will wait until he thinks nobody is looking to wipe a fleck of spittle off his
face.

I’ve stuttered for more than 60 years, and the mysteries of the
encumbrance still catch me up…” U.S.News [via higgy]

Rising Waters: “The seven million inhabitants of the Pacific Islands have
already experienced the first effects of global warming.
Elevated water temperatures, violent storms and rising sea
levels are beginning to destroy delicate ecosystems, forcing
islanders to consider leaving their homes and communities.
Cultures that have thrived for centuries are threatened with
extinction.

Tracing the impacts of climate change from the tropical
Pacific to the island of Manhattan, Rising Waters:
Global Warming and the Fate of the Pacific Islands examines international policies and the lives of
those most urgently affected by the global warming debate.”

The Breasts in my Camera ‘So what is it that compels men to take pictures of naked women, and perhaps specifically, their breasts? Is it as
simple as breast envy? Do we all simply want our very own pair to play with and have and hold and fondle and…
you get the point. That is certainly a possibility. If a man can’t have breasts, he can at least “own” them by taking
a picture of them.’

Paul McCartney Finds a New Mode for Expressing Love and Loss. The New York Times covers his recent poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y in NYC.

Senate Democrats Square Off With Bush Over Missile Plan “Senate
Democrats put forward some of
their most influential voices on national
security policy today and made clear that
President Bush’s plans for an expansive
missile defense system could well become a
defining point of contention between the
two parties.” New York Times

There had better be a line in the sand over this issue! Most coverage of the opposition to the NMD plan cites concerns over expense and questions of effectiveness. It’s important that the public debate be couched instead in terms that help the American people understand that the real issue is the abandonment of the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) treaty, one of the cornerstones of arms control, and the invalidation of the premise of mutually assured destruction that has been the only thing between them and nuclear holocaust.

The overarching activist passion of my life was disarmament work until it appeared possible to rest easier over the last decade or so and come out from under the shadow of the “psychic numbing,” to use the phrase of psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, that was necessary to carry on daily existence under the threat of annihilation. The human race was engaged in almost the most profound struggle for its survival imaginable, without most even recognizing it — and appeared to be winning, slowly but surely turning back the hands of the famous clock on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that told us how many minutes away from ‘midnight’ we were. (It’s 11:51 now, by the way.)

And now these wretched bloody brainwashed fools in Washington, worshipping at the altar of nuclearism, will unilaterally return us to the shadows of a new arms race, and for what? So that Bush can hearken back to the only kind of world in which his advisors — his Daddy’s advisors, for God’s sake! — know how to live?

Relapsing into terror after a respite is even worse than realizing one had been living with it unremittingly for one’s entire life, and now we have children my wife and I thought we were going to be able to raise in a world that, no matter how terrible, it would always be possible to assure them would continue to exist. We can’t live with this, literally.

If the Democrats have the political will to do something about this, it’s one very good reason to wish for haste in Strom Thurmond’s departure from the Senate…

Moral Poverty and Body Counts: “John Walters is a veteran of drug policy shambles. As the deputy director under
former drug czar William Bennett, he helped craft drug war policies that have
shattered millions of lives, wasted billions of dollars and exacerbated America’s
drug crisis. He’s a hard-core ideologue who misrepresents the facts and spouts
tough-on-crime rhetoric.

In other words, John Walters is the Bush administration’s perfect choice to be the
next drug czar.” AlterNet

Some readers have given me feedback, intermittently, that the URL to FmH is too convoluted for convenience. They’re probably using an unnecessarily complicated web address. Here’s a rundown of how to get here.

Most people probably use “http://world.std.com/~emg/blogger.html.”

My webserver, I just discovered, has a slightly simpler alias, so you can use “http://TheWorld.com/~emg/blogger.html.” Of course, uppercase is optional.

These expand to the mother of them all, “http://world.std.com/home/dacha/WWW/emg/public_html/blogger.html.” Not many takers, I’m guessing.

By far the easiest: “http://gelwan.com/blogger.html.” Has the advantage of portability too, if I ever change web host I’ll point the gelwan.com domain to my new site. I’m Eliot Gelwan, by the way.

Update: A reader wrote to let me know that “http://fmh.webhop.org” is will get you here too. Some kind soul set that up through the Dynamic DNS Network. I just created an account there and set up “http://fmh.webhop.net” to point here too. [thanks, Daniel]

I know I should get around to owning followmehere.com or something similar. Maybe some day [but don’t think that if you ‘squat’ at that domain you can ever ransom it to me for large sums of money (grin)]…

Hackers vs. Hollywood, the Sequel: “2600 Magazine, the hacker-zine that posted the DeCSS utility on its site and was sued by
the motion picture industry, is appealing its loss during a trial that took place last year.” Facing off to argue the case will be, on one side, the dean of Stanford University’s law school and, on the other, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Wired

Bupropion Sustained Release for Bereavement: Results of an Open Trial. “Major depressive symptoms occurring shortly after the loss of a loved one (i.e., bereavement) appear to respond to bupropion SR.
Treatment of these symptoms does not intensify grief; rather, improvement in depression is associated with decreases in grief intensity. The results of this
study challenge prevailing clinical wisdom that DSM-IV-defined bereavement should not be treated.” J Clin Psychiatry IMHO, this study’s conclusions exemplify the worst of the mechanistic modern psychopharmacologically astute but psychologically naive clinical psychiatric approach. The authors appear to think that their findings challenge the ‘prevailing wisdom’ because they have demonstrated the efficacy — measured in terms of symptom intensity reduction — of treatment, but refraining from treating grief with antidepressants was never based on the misapprehension that the treatment would be ineffective! It is precisely because antidepressant treatment does decrease grief intensity that the ‘prevailing wisdom’ suggesting that bereavement not be treated is wisdom! Just because we can treat something doesn’t mean we must, and bereavement is a prime example; grieving serves a purpose which should not be prevented from unfolding in most instances. From Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding of melancholy to the modern psychobiological conception of depression and the evolutionary biology perspective, the distinctions as well as the similarities between grief and melancholic depression have been clear — the latter is the former gone awry in some way. And that, in simple but profound terms, is the reason you treat one but not the other.

‘…(N)ew rules in a Beijing school district
this spring have listed “40 forbiddens” – words, phrases, and sentences – that teachers may no
longer fire off at their trembling charges… (I)t is no longer acceptable to say, for example: “If I were
you, I would not continue to live. You are hopeless.” Or, “You
are a wood post with two ears. Get out.” Banned, too, is a
phrase students say is among the most unpopular and most
heard phrases: “Whoever teaches you has the worst luck.” ‘ Christian Science Monitor

Why We Love The Sopranos by Philip Ringstrom,Margaret Crastnopol, Glen Gabbard, and Joel Whitebook continues: “Here again we see that Tony is not a psychopath but is
a complex person who is capable of conflict-based
suffering. Jennifer looks disgusted about his poor
compliance with the medication she prescribed him,
but she doesn’t seem to notice that he goes further
than he usually does by revealing that his lost friend
worked for the feds. He seems to be trying to use the
therapy in this episode.”

“(I)n this episode, either the writers have lost
their feel for the psychotherapy, or the therapist has
lost her feel for the patient. Jennifer misses the
significance of Tony’s effort to tolerate and consider
the complexities of his plight, having caught Jackie in
his web of lies–Tony knows what Jackie’s like deep
down, hopes it’s not true, wants to protect Meadow,
and yet is (narcissistically) unable to allow her to
transcend his own life or worldview.”

Slate

Time Capsule Music Gets Flushed The team putting together The New York Times Capsule, being buried for our descendants in the year 3000, has had to scrap its plans to include representative late-20th century pop music because of its inability to get copyright permission from the music industry. Wired

Happy May Day!

Ethel the Blog has been watching these stories recently:

insights from J. R. McNeill’s Something New Under the
Sun: An Environmental History of the
Twentieth-Century World;

a remembrance of Harvard’s renowned ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes; I’m only just learning of, and diminished by, his death on April 10 at the age of 86. Schultes, from whom I was privileged to take a seminar as an undergraduate (he gave the class at 6:00 a.m., as I recall, to screen out the frivolous and undisciplined [yes, I attended every meeting]), was the mentor of Wade Davis, Marc Plotkin and (Ethel fails to note) Andrew Weil, and arguably one of the West’s experts on indigenous mind-altering and medicinal plant use in the Amazon. He was a swashbuckling Indiana Jones figure who “went native” with indigenous peoples in search of their botanical knowledge and a conservationist raising the hue and cry about the preservation of the rainforests decades before it was fashionable. From the New York Times’ obituary:

Dr. Schultes’s research into plants that produced hallucinogens like peyote and
ayahuasca made some of his books cult favorites among youthful drug
experimenters in the 1960’s. His findings also influenced cultural icons like Aldous
Huxley, William Burroughs and Carlos Castaneda, writers who considered
hallucinogens as the gateways to self-discovery.

Dr. Schultes disdained these self- appointed prophets of an inner reality. He
scathingly dismissed Timothy Leary, the drug guru of the 1960’s who also taught
at Harvard, for being so little versed in hallucinogenic species that he misspelled
the Latin names of the plants.

According to a 1996 article in The Los Angeles Times, when Mr. Burroughs once
described a psychedelic trip as an earth-shaking metaphysical experience, Dr.
Schultes’s response was, “That’s funny, Bill, all I saw was colors.”

coverage of James Bamford’s claim, in his new book Body of Secrets about the National Security Agency [it’s on my list…] , that the 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, fatal for 34 American sailors, was not as Israel has always claimed an accident, but carried out for counterintelligence purposes;

Orrin Hatch’s pivotal and hypocritical role in the brewing storm over Shrub’s judicial appointments; and

an interesting, head-turning followup to the Lockerbie trial suggesting it may not have been the Libyans after all who were responsible for the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing.

Several webloggers’ links to this exciting medical news show how relieved they are.

Here She Comes to Save the Day! Was This Man a Genius?, Julie Hecht’s relentless, obsessional portrait of Andy Kaufman gets “as close to answering the Kaufman question as any book, movie or REM song”, says the New York Times reviewer. I missed the whole Kaufman phenomenon since I never watched TV in those days and had a particular commitment to avoiding Saturday Night Live. I caught the Milos Forman film more recently on TV late one aimless, sleepless night, and it sounds like Hecht’s book gets at the same frustrating love-hate relationship Kaufman provoked according to the film — was he a genius? an obnoxious fool? or both? (Liked the REM song, though…)

Lunch at the White House Proves No Big Draw: ‘President Bush marked his first 100
days in office with a White House luncheon
today to which all 535 members of
Congress were invited. But only about a
third of them showed up, and the political
parties ended up squabbling over the value
of what had been billed as a bipartisan
outing.’ Dick Armey commented, “A romance has got to be reciprocal. If I were the president, I’d be starting to get courtship fatigue. How
much can you pursue these guys and have them continue to complain that you’re
not pursuing them?” The dessert was described by one guest — a Republican, no less — as “nasty.” Sorry to crow. New York Times

Pepsi Looks to a New Drink to Jolt Soda Sales. Essentially a wild cherry Mountain Dew, Pepsi engineers the new drink to add the urban minority market to other niches — Rocket Power white youth, computer programmers — it has addicted to its original high-caffeine soft drink. In so doing, it breaks ranks with stonewalllling beverage companies by acknowledging for the first time that caffeine is in soft drinks for the physiological effect, not the flavor. New York Times

Law Professor Sees Hazard in Personalized News. Intelligent filtering software [and webloggers, i.e. “intelligent filtering wetware”??] making focused information delivery possible but, argues University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein in Republic.com, can narrow minds and souls.

The last part of Sunstein’s book contains some modest proposals. He’d like to see
a large Web site that was “privately-created, and that operated as a
deliberative domain,” he said, where curious people could go to encounter a mix
of viewpoints on various topics, like abortion, gun control and politics.

He’d also encourage Web sites to offer links to opposing viewpoints as a matter
of course. “Liberal publications to conservative ones, and vice versa,” he said,
adding that government regulation of links to promote democratic values was
“worth considering.”

Wood s lot points to this essay from The Globe and Mail: When depression turns deadly, which asks “Can antidepressants transform despair into suicide?” Although there’s no love lost between me as a psychopharmacologist and the rapacious pharmaceutical manufacturers, the article is misleading. It’s no surprise that the manufacturer of Prozac, Eli Lilly, settles lawsuits out of court and tries to minimize negative evidence, but that doesn’t damn the drug, only the corporation. The research studies that purported to show a link between SSRIs and suicide are largely discredited, methodologically flawed and inconclusive. I’m familiar with several of the Boston-area psychiatrists featured prominently as critics of the SSRIs, and know them to be sensationalistic media hounds. Anecdotal reports of suicide on Prozac and other SSRIs come from a number of factors:

Early on, when these observations were first made, Prozac was being tried on the most desperately ill patients who had failed most existing antidepressant treatment. Many of us think the suicidal despair that arose in a subset of these early users was not due to a pharmacological effect of the drug but subjects’ added disappointment at its failure to live up to its miracle ‘hype’ in such recalcitrant cases. Many of the most chronically, treatment-resistant depressed cases do not represent classical ‘major depressive episodes’ which have a good prognosis for medication response, but rather the entrenched,lifelong and atypical depression of patients with personality disorders, especially borderline personality disorder. These patients are prone to both suggestibility and self-destructiveness. Suicidality is always a risk factor in unresponsive depression.

Suicidality is a risk factor in improving depression too. All antidepressants can promote suicidality in that, paradoxically, as depression responds, the first thing to change — before the despair and hopelessness that make the sufferer conclude she should end her life — may be her energy, motivation and confidence to carry out a suicide plan. It is an old chestnut in psychiatric training to watch for this problem, a skill that has fallen by the wayside with modern prescribing practices (see below).

Prozac and several other SSRIs can cause as a side effect a particularly uncomfortable kind of restlessness technically known as akathisia, which can make a person feel like jumping out of their skin — or jumping out of a window. But which can be managed and reversed.

The real culprit here regarding suicide risk is that the SSRIs were such a real advance over previous generations of antidepressants in ease of use (except for the akathisia and sexual dysfunction they cause, which were not appreciated at the outset) absence of severe side effects and nonlethality in overdose, that the prevalence of antidepressant treatment in the population exploded when they caught on. This was largely achieved by an as-yet-unheard-of marketing strategy — the manufacturers targeted not psychiatrists but internists and other primary practitioners to be their major prescribers. Very appealing to the target practitioners — they could handle their patients’ emotional complaints themselves without referrals to psychiatrists, and could offer these endlessly complaining patients (who some estimates suggest make up as much as 50% of the traffic in many primary care practices) something more than time-consuming talk in their office visits. The upshot, of course, was that depression — and, worse yet, difficult personality disorders — began to be treated without adequate time, sufficient skill in the subtle art of suicide assessment, or expertise in management of psychopharmacological side effects.

Finally, let us recall that the anti-Prozac movement was spearheaded by S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*i*s*t*s, and that is not just an ad hominem argument! [The asterisks, of course, are because I am paranoid about persecutory lawsuits or denial-of-service attacks…]

Wood s lot also pointed me to this Guardian essay — Pete May on turning into your dad — and pulled this quote: ” It is a weird and far
from pleasant feeling, this cross-generational migration of souls.” A striking metaphor, but it grabbed me also because my loose association was to the absorbing, if abit uneven, novel I’m reading. David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten spins a web with its structure of nine individual narrators, drawn with skillful characterization and sharp clear prose, scattered to nine disparate corners of the world but connected by serendipity. A masterful and lyrical chapter which I could not help feeling throughout my reading can — and perhaps should — be read independently ‘describes’ the journey of a transmigrating soul in Mongolia struggling to understand its place in the world, its relationship with its succession of human hosts, and the meaning of their humanness. Of course, one reviewer castigates Mitchell as “a bit heavy on the supernatural hooey.” Interestingly, that reviewer too observes that the Mongolian chapter could stand alone.

CIA Declassifies Documents on Hitler, Other Nazis: “There were the Nazis the United States
wanted to try as criminals, and there were
other Nazis it wanted to try out as employees.
Some 10,000 pages of declassified CIA
documents made public Friday reveal a
wartime agency tracking Nazis as deadly enemies, and a postwar
organization hiring newfound ‘friends’ to spy.”

Court Orders Hospital to Release Man. The man, who suffered head injuries in an April 2000 accident, was released from a Bombay hospital by court order after his family alleged that the hospital was keeping him only because they could not pay his bill. The hospital contends that he still requires hospital treatment. Reuters

Citing Declining Membership, a Leader Disbands His Militia: ‘The leader of a paramilitary group in northern
Michigan said today that the group was disbanding because
membership had plummeted and it no longer had any members with enough
military experience to lead training exercises in the woods.

The leader… attributed the dwindling membership to the election of President Bush.
“Across the nation, there is a satisfaction among patriots with the way things are
going,” he said.’ New York Times

Thousands sign Web petition against Alaska wolf hunt. “Alaska’s wolf wars have
hit cyberspace with the listing of an online petition opposing a Web site auction for a guided wolf hunt
near Denali National Park and Preserve.

The hunt, offered on eBay by outfitter Brent Keith of Healy, Alaska, is a fund-raiser for rock star Ted
Nugent’s Kamp for Kids, a program that gets kids out of urban areas, away from drugs and crime, and
into the woods to learn how to bowhunt.” The petition is here, if you’re so inclined. When I looked today, it had 9,196 of a target 10,000 signatures.

Strom in the Balance: “It may be hard sometimes to escape the impression that the Senate chamber
resembles the fossil-strewn reading room of some Ivy League club, occupied by
alumni from before the Depression, men with rich lives behind them and no place
else to go. But it is equally hard to escape the judgment of which institution does
better at capitalizing on their experience. Offering excellent health care, the
stimulating presence of young people, a range of activities from simple to
complex and relevancy, the Senate is the most effective nursing home in the
world, which no doubt helps explain why Thurmond has lived so long.” New York Times

Parents’ Sexual Orientation Matters, Study Finds: “USC sociologists Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey examined 21 studies on the subject dating back
to 1980 and found that children of lesbians and gays are more likely to depart from traditional
gender roles than children of heterosexual couples. Their findings were published in the American
Sociological Review.

In an interview on Friday, Biblarz said that the study found that information on the subject had
previously been stifled and the differences played down.”

Gene Therapy Restores Vision in Dog: “Using gene therapy, scientists have restored vision
in dogs with a version of a rare disease that blinds human infants. The
work may lead to treatments for several genetic forms of blindness.” AP

Exorcising the Homunculus: There’s No One Behind the Curtain. A neuroscience perspective from a research associate at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition in Pittsburgh on the localization of will. “What emerges is a general story in which the frontal cortex sends actively maintained control signals to much of the rest of the
brain. The nature of these signals is selected primarily by circuits in the limbic system, based on predictions of reward. The control
signals maintained in working memory, along with conflict-related processing in the anterior cingulate, give rise to the selection of
appropriate actions for the current situation.” Free Inquiry

Baby Not Crawling? Reason Seems to Be Less Tummy Time. “(P)ediatricians …are noticing more and more
babies who are not lifting their heads when
they used to, who are not turning over and
who are not crawling at 6 to 8 months,
when popular baby books say they should.

Developmental specialists say they think they know why babies are acting this
way: it is an entirely benign, but unexpected and unintended, consequence of a
public health campaign to teach parents to put babies to sleep on their backs to
prevent sudden infant death syndrome.

An increasing number of babies never crawl at all, pediatricians say, going
directly from sitting to toddling. And they are seeing more parents … who are worried that something is wrong.” New York Times

We Fear, Therefore We Make. “The genesis of culture is fear, argues Hungarian
sociologist Elemér Hankiss in Fears and Symbols: An Introduction to the
Study of Western Civilization , and
in order to prove his thesis, he examines an array of
human symbols, behaviors and other cultural
phenomena as manifestations of how people cope with
what frightens them.” Central Europe Review

100 Down, Only 1361 to Go: In Early Battles, Bush Learns Need for Compromises. Li’l George has given himself high marks at the hundred-day milepost, and has been praised for moderation and compromising on such issues as taxation and spending. New York Times But, hello, could it be more a function of having less legitimacy and mandate than any other sitting President and realizing that he may have a hard time getting through any of the polemical (and polarizing) policy he promised in an unsuccessful attempt to court his electoral constituency? Incidentally, as I predicted, he’s using his intellectual limitations as an asset, endearing himself to a public relieved rather than concerned at having a lightweight in office.

Adbusters: Fools Festival: “On April 1st 2001, legions of fools in ten
different countries descended on their local
malls and let money rain down on the heads of
the shell-shocked. The resulting pandemonium
was a boon to the foolish at heart and proved
that throwing money at the problem works –
when the problem is conformity!

Way to go fools!”

The Decline and Fall (cont’d.): 6 Red Cross Aid Workers Are Slain in Congo. The accelerating phenomenon of murders by combatants of humanitarian aid workers represents to me the height of barbarity and evidence that the thin shreds of humanity left in the world are fraying further. “The attack, which apparently occurred early Thursday
afternoon, claimed the greatest number of the neutral
organization’s workers since a December 1996 massacre in
which six hospital staff were brutally slain in Chechnya. Three
Red Cross workers were murdered in the central African country
of Burundi the same year…

The latest incident, Geneva officials said, may well be linked to
the proliferation of undisciplined military forces that do not
respect the traditional Red Cross role. In 1996 fighting in the
former Zaire, now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
soldiers ignored the protective sign and looted humanitarian
supplies, according to Red Cross officials.” Twenty-seven expatriates working under the Red Cross have been killed in the course of their duties since World War II, the majority of them since 1990. International Herald Tribune

Reproductive Emergency. Wendy Kaminer: “Battles over anti-abortion measures like these are important, but they are mere skirmishes
compared to the upcoming fight over the next Supreme Court nominee. Justice Sandra Day
O’Connor, who has been crucial in maintaining the 5–4 majority in favor of Roe, is expected to
retire soon. Bush will, no doubt, nominate a judge opposed to abortion rights, and if he or she
is confirmed, Roe v. Wade will be overruled as soon as the next case challenging it wends its
way to the Court.

The crusade to make abortions illegal and unsafe (they are unlikely ever to be rare) does pose
political risks for Republicans. If outright abortion prohibitions and a reversal of Roe v. Wade
were popular, Bush would not have cloaked his support for them during the campaign. Female
voters deprived of all abortion rights could become a more potent political force than are male
voters who fear being deprived of their guns. If reproductive choice falls victim to the Bush
administration, the administration could in turn fall victim to reproductive choice. But once
revoked, rights are not quickly or easily restored; and the Supreme Court outlives the
administrations that shape it. A Bush Court would survive, while women and girls would die
from illegal abortions.” The American Prospect

Bush Whacked. Robert Kuttner: “George W. Bush is losing his working majority in Congress. The only surprise is that it took so
long. As recently as a month ago, the new administration imagined that its tax package would
just sail through on a tide of media torpor, Republican discipline, and bipartisan gesture.” The American Prospect

Back from the Brink: “Psychological treatments for schizophrenia attract renewed
interest… Researchers are increasingly exploring ways to combine
psychological and social approaches with antipsychotic drugs, especially
in the early stages of the disorder. Techniques in the spotlight include
family-education sessions, job training, social rehabilitation, and several
forms of one-on-one psychotherapy.” Schizophrenia is a brain disorder we so far haven’t found a way to ‘cure.” But if we do, I’m convinced that it is not going to be through the ‘talking cure’, as psychotherapy has been called since the days of Freud, since which time clinicians have been valiantly attempting a gamut of therapeutic techniques with patients suffering from schizophrenia. The emphasis on medication treatment is not, as this article implies, because of physicians being bombarded with pharmaceutical company pressures to see things that way to support drug company profits, or because managed medical care discouraged complicated and time-consuming psychotherapeutic approaches. It began decades before the current generation of extremely costly ‘atypical’ antipsychotic medications, when we had dirt-cheap generic antipsychotics off patent protection because they had been around for decades; and it began a medical school generation before managed care was a blip on the horizon. It is simply because schizophrenia is a family of conditions in which basic brain functioning is awry in profound ways which cannot be corrected by reorganizing the personality structure and relatedness with insight, catharsis or the other magics that a therapy relationship works in ‘lesser’ conditions. Nevertheless, the art of creating a nonthreatening, supportive, thoughtful, safe treatment context with someone for whom all human interaction has become bewildering and terrifying had largely been lost somewhere along the way. It’s true that the baby had been thrown out with the bathwater and that psychiatrists-to-be can go through their entire training process without learning how to talk to such patients. If inddeed there’s a resurgence of interest in learning how to talk to the most psychiatrically ill patients, it can only be a good thing. Me? I’d never stopped… Science News

Salon.com offering porn to stay alive. “Trendy online rag Salon has addressed its steadily decreasing
relevance by embracing it fully.” The Register

Bovine Hormone Whistleblowers Honored: “On Monday, April 23 Jane
Akre and Steve Wilson —
two Tampa journalists who
took on the Fox television
network in a legal suit over
censorship of their
investigative report on the
safety of bovine growth
hormone — were named the
winners of the North
American part of the
prestigious 2001 Goldman
Environmental Prize.” Utne Reader

Adbusters: Fools Festival: “On April 1st 2001, legions of fools in ten
different countries descended on their local
malls and let money rain down on the heads of
the shell-shocked. The resulting pandemonium
was a boon to the foolish at heart and proved
that throwing money at the problem works –
when the problem is conformity!

Way to go fools!”

You Can Hide From Prying Eyes. Reports of the demise of online privacy have been exaggerated, it appears. Declan McCullagh reports from the recent fourth Information Hiding Workshop on some clever thinking about how to hide your online identity from those who have an interest in tracing your activities, Wired such as these people.

Inmates Do More Than Phone Home: “With the 1st Amendment as a shield and monitoring spotty, prisoners make
calls to arrange crimes that include murder.” LA Times

Google Restores Deja View. “The porn is back. The chronicles of many nasty flamewars are back, too. And everything you ever said
in Usenet, back before you had a real job or kids to worry about, has now returned to haunt you.

Popular Internet search site Google has made more than 500-million archived Usenet messages — an
archive dating back to 1995 — available online again.” Wired

Journalists Protest Gag Order: “The Electronic Frontier Foundation will represent a Seattle journalist collective that is
the target of a police probe and court-imposed gag order.

On Saturday evening, FBI agents visited the downtown offices of the Independent Media Center and
handed the group a court order — apparently related to the Quebec City trade summit — that also
instructed the media organization not to publish the contents of the order…

Still unclear is what the gag order says, or doesn’t say. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
reported on Tuesday that the FBI visit was connected to the online publishing of
security plans from the high-level trade summit held last weekend. Jill Freidberg, a Seattle IMC spokeswoman, said that “what was put out on the Seattle
P-I is filled with unfathomable inaccuracies” but, citing the gag order, refused to
provide details.” Wired

Arabs See Jewish Conspiracy in Pokemon. ‘Japanese embassies throughout the region have received inquiries from parents
and officials who had heard that Pokemon was Japanese for “I am a Jew.” ‘ LA Times

A columnist for the Worcester, Massachusetts Telegram & Gazette has angrily
quit his post after readers objected to a column — and his editor agreed.

James Dempsey’s April 20 column satirized Worcester residents’ fears of a
planned visit by Harley-Davidson enthusiasts by assigning similar concerns to
an upcoming convention of priests. “I see nothing but grief coming out of
this,” Dempsey wrote. “They’ll inspire the locals with their troublemaking
ways, and when they leave we’ll have the problem of swaggering,
cigarette-puffing altar boys to deal with.”

Readers offended by Dempsey’s column included Gazette editor Harry Whitin,
who published an apology calling the piece “mean-spirited, anti-Catholic and
crude.” Furious, Dempsey announced his decision to abandon the column and
return to the paper’s reporting staff.

“You don’t OK a column and then, because of some criticism, publicly
humiliate the columnist…” Dempsey fumed on Wednesday. “How is a columnist
to write provocatively, or indulge in satire or criticism, without wondering
whether the next day he or she will be excoriated in the newspaper and
characterized as a bungling fool?”

Readers discussed the flap in the newspaper’s message boards. [via Spike Report]

‘ “I joined the baboon troop during my twenty-first year. I had never planned
to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I
would become a mountain gorilla.” So begins Robert Sapolsky’s new book, A
Primate’s Memoir, about the time he spent in Kenya’s Serengeti over the
past twenty years, researching the stress levels of a troop of baboons.’

“For these baboons, stress is entirely socially generated, so they
really are good models for us. Study some marginal baboon population in
some dying ecosystem and it would not be anywhere near relevant to making
sense of which middle-aged executive gets heart disease. Our stress is
created by our privileged cocooning from ecological stressors; likewise
these baboons.”

An interview with Sapolsky, a professor of
biology and neurology at Stanford with wide-ranging interests and a MacArthur fellowship,
covers everything from the shadows
colonialism still casts on Africa, to the fallacy of free will, to why he
only rates as a “pathetically low-ranking baboon.”

Includes
excerpts from A Primate’s Memoir. The Atlantic

Planet ‘Survivor’: Astronomers Witness First Steps of Planet Growth – And Destruction. ‘Planet formation is a hazardous process. New pictures from the Hubble telescope are giving astronomers the first
direct visual evidence for the growth of planetary “building blocks” inside the dusty disks of young stars in the Orion
Nebula, a giant “star factory” near Earth. But these snapshots also reveal that the disks are being “blowtorched” by
a blistering flood of ultraviolet radiation from the region’s brightest star, making planet formation extremely difficult.’

Acne: No Longer Just a Market for Teenagers. Adult women, even those who describe themselves as having had perfect skin in their adolescence, are increasingly seeking cosmetic and medical treatments for acne. Some dermatological experts say adult acne truly is on the rise in women, and point to the hormonal consequences of increased stress in modern life. Critics think it is simply a matter of women being more worried about blemishes than they used to be, a fact exploited — or perhaps created — by pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies aggressively attempting to expand their marketing territory. New York Times

The Outsider: Taking Flight, Tension-Free “Almost exactly 100 years ago, a couple of guys from Dayton, Ohio, went
down to Kitty Hawk, took the strings off their kites and ruined the whole thing.” New York Times

Who Built the H-Bomb? Debate Revives thanks to a tape-recorded memoir by conservative hero Dr. Edward Teller, disparaging scientific rivals as he faces death. New York Times

Science’s Elusive Realm: Life’s Little Mysteries. The new Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) at Los Alamos studies what prominent scientists calls the ‘mesoscale,’ between the realm of molecules describable in quantum mechanical terms and the realm of the cell where well-described biological theory holds sway. Difficult to investigate, it is the level on which cell constituents interact with one another and the elucidation of its organizing principles and deeper theory will help us “to understand and maybe even design matter that organizes itself into living systems… To start with, ICAM researchers are focusing on one beguiling fact: complex
systems can arise out of simple constituents that interact with each other in ways
not necessarily obvious”, looking at, for example, the mystery of protein folding.

” ‘We are letting nature tell us what it likes to do.’ … Such experiments have
extraordinary implications… Unlike vitalism — a doctrine that says
the processes of life are not explicable by the laws of physics and chemistry
alone and that life is in some way self-determining — the research into complex
adaptive matter says that life is the consequence of molecular interactions.

‘If we can discover organizing principles in biology other than evolution, it means
we will be able to make living systems in the laboratory. We
can understand how life began.’ ” New York Times

News Analysis: Intelligence Fallouts for Bush. “Two
significant flare-ups early in his term — the collision of an American spy plane
and a Chinese fighter, and the mistaken downing of a plane carrying a
missionary family over Peru during an anti-narcotics operation — involved
elements of American intelligence.

By operating in gray areas beyond the scope of other aspects of American
foreign policy, such intelligence operations come with the potential for creating
international incidents, government officials say.” New York Times

For an Undersea Library. From Jim Higgins’ weblog: “A salesman for Borders who had recently started calling on Navy bases in Puget Sound asked the poet
W.S. Merwin what books he should recommend to the crews and captains of Trident submarines (with their
nuclear weapons), which have small libraries frequently visited by the sailors during their months at sea:

He asked Merwin:

Could any poem, novel or short story cause anyone to interrupt their learned sequence of actions, once
they have been ordered to launch? What words do I hope these men have read, and thought of, before
they push buttons?

Merwin took his questions seriously. In an essay in the May/June 2001 issue of American Poetry Review,
Merwin chooses five books and five poems, and explaining his reasons for each. He made a point of
choosing works that are fairly modern, making them accessible to contemporary readers.” [thanks, Higgy]

Browsing Higgins’ site yielded the following gem as well. Word Ways: the Journal of Recreational Linguistics. “For more than thirty years, Word Ways has explored the many facets of logology (an old word
resurrected by the late Dmitri Borgmann to describe recreational linguistics). Dmitri wrote the classic book on
this topic — Language on Vacation (Scribner’s, 1965), now out of print — and was the first Word Ways
editor in 1968. Word Ways is currently edited by Ross Eckler, author of the recent book Making the
Alphabet Dance (St. Martin’s, 1996), a survey of the field and the many new discoveries made in the last
thirty-five years.” [thanks, Higgy] Here are two entertaining tidbits from Word Ways:

the Francis Xavier O’Brien Problem

Nixon and the Bee

Ex-Senator Kerrey Admits Role in Vietnam Massacre “I went out on a mission, and after it was over, I was so ashamed I
wanted to die. This is killing me. I’m tired of people describing me as a hero and
holding this inside… I understand that there are all kinds of potential consequences, up
to and including somebody saying, ‘This is a war crime, and let’s
investigate and charge him and put him in prison’ .” Here’s the New York Times investigative report which broke the story.

Crew Unable to Destroy All Secrets on China Plane “In some cases the crew was not able to physically destroy the
material, and in others what they tried to destroy was not destroyed
to the extent that rendered it useless, the source said.” Uhh, under what circumstances, then, could failsafe measures be taken??

Browser delays hit Mozilla, Microsoft “Two pending browser upgrades — one from Microsoft Corp. and one from Mozilla.org — have fallen
behind schedule.

Mozilla.org.’s Mozilla 1.0 browser, which
until last week was expected to go gold
in May, is now expected sometime in the third calendar quarter of this
year…
At the same time, Microsoft’s next version of its MSN Explorer consumer browser, which Microsoft
had said it planned to make publicly available last week, now won’t be available until some time
in early May, a Microsoft spokesman confirmed.” ZDNet

Sex, lies and monogamy: “At the heart of all
long-term relationships lies a fundamental
deception — women only stay with men for security,
and men only stay with women for sex. It’s a
cynical view of human relationships, but
researchers now say it is the driving force behind
the evolution of monogamy–and women started
it. By offering sex all the time, females in
monogamous species disguise whether they are
fertile and trick males into sticking around.” New Scientist

How to delude yourself: ‘Robyn Dawes, a psychologist at Carnegie
Mellon University in Pittsburgh (Everyday Irrationality: How pseudo-scientists, lunatics,
and the rest of us systematically fail to think rationally, Westview Press),
wants to show us how to recognise thinking
that is not merely muddy or wrong, but
“irrational” in a strict sense, in that it leads the
thinker into a self-contradiction.’ New Scientist

Sleep in early life may play crucial role in brain development. A new study shows that sleep enhances brain connectivity during a critical period of visual development in cats, a process called plasticity. The new study strongly suggests that sleep functions to help consolidate the effects of new learning in response to exposure to novel experience. “This is the first direct evidence that sleep modifies the effect of environmental stimuli on the development of new brain connections,” said the principal researcher.

While the study focused specifically on the impact of sleep on neuronal remodeling during the critical period for visual development in the
cat, the researchers believe the finding has broader implications, not just for plasticity during development in other brain structures, but for
plasticity in the adult brain.

If this is shown to be the case, sleep could prove an important part of the strategy for preparing for such challenges as exams. “The fact
that sleep provoked slightly more plasticity than double the amount of exposure to experience [when cats remained awake in a lit room]
suggests that if you reviewed your notes thoroughly until you were tired and then slept, you’d achieve as much plasticity, or ‘learning,’ in the
brain as if you’d pulled an all-nighter repeating your review of the material”…

“This discovery offers direction for examining the two major hypotheses for how sleep impacts plasticity. One theory is that patterned
neuronal activity following a period of environmental stimulation is replayed during non-REM sleep, strengthening neuronal connection
changes. The alternative theory, which could also work in conjunction with the first, is that powerful growth factors, such as neurotrophins,
which are known to be necessary for cortical plasticity, are released during non-REM sleep.” EurekAlert!

Lost Innocence: “This coming Saturday marks the birthday of the mathematician
Kurt Gödel. Born in what was then Austria, on April 28 1906,
Gödel died in Princeton, New Jersey on January 14 1978, having
developed a paranoia that he was being poisoned and, as a
result, starving himself to death (an altogether odd end for one of
the greatest logicians the world has ever known).

Two years ago, when Time magazine conducted a poll to
determine the 20 most influential thinkers of the 20th century,
Gödel was one of just two mathematicians in the score.” The Guardian

Teenage boys are embracing fatherhood: “Scientists have found that boys aged between 11
and 14 … unconsciously change the way they
cradle babies, a sign of their emerging parental
instincts. Nurturing behaviour at such a young age
appears to be a new phenomenon and may be
connected to the positive portrayal of fatherhood by
role models such as David Beckham.

Eighty per cent of people cradle babies on the left,
a preference that has little to do with whether they
are right- or left-handed. Past studies have shown
that the trait is present in girls as young as six. They
have also suggested that it only emerges in men
when they first become fathers.

The new study shows, however, that it is beginning to emerge at an earlier age in adolescent males. The article doesn’t explain this phenomenon of left-sided cradling, which I think has to do with unconsciously preferring to activate the nonverbal (nondominant, “emotional”) hemisphere with the direction of one’s gaze on the baby’s face. The Telegraph

Civility and Double Standards. Robert Parry: ‘As George W. Bush completes his first 100 days in office, he seems to have
accomplished at least one of his campaign promises: restoring civility to
Washington. The national press corps — that couldn’t use the word “liar”
enough when describing Al Gore’s supposed exaggerations or pretty much
anything about Bill and Hillary Clinton — now tip-toes around apparent
contradictions and misstatements by the new administration.

While some might call this a victory for civility, others might call it a
double standard. (Here’s) how the national press corps
avoids the “L” word in this new era…’ The Consortium

Psychoanalysts continue to discuss The Sopranos: ‘There is no doubt the Jennifer finds herself in an extremely difficult
therapeutic situation. Gloria and Tony are toying with her like
“great cats of prey”–contemptuously flaunting their power and
defiance–and there isn’t much Dr. Melfi can do.’ Slate. Looking at the archives of this discussion, by the way, it’s clear the four analysts are enthralled by the show’s characterization and plotting. Comments indicate that they (including the renowned Dr. Gabbard, who has written a well-received book, Psychiatry and the Cinema) consider this ongoing subplot the most realistic media depiction of the psychotherapy process they’ve seen. And Gabbard observes:

Two of the writers, Robin Green and Mitchell
Burgess, also executive producers, spoke at an analytic
meeting last year in L.A., where they were given an award.
When we asked them about how they came up with such
accurate depictions of psychotherapy in the series, they said
that most of the writing team had been in psychotherapy
themselves. They don’t actually use consultants for the therapy
scenes (except for medication questions), but the accuracy
appears to stem from good treatment experiences in their own
lives.